


Obsidiana/Etz'nab'

by CypressSunn



Series: One Hundred and One Shots [10]
Category: Mayans M.C. (TV)
Genre: Bad Spanish, F/M, Pre-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-20 07:31:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17618132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CypressSunn/pseuds/CypressSunn
Summary: “Rebels and outlaws,” is all he says with a rueful last look between them. “Ain’t got allegiances, but we got loyalty.”





	Obsidiana/Etz'nab'

**Author's Note:**

> Or, what happens when you wonder what courting/collaborating with a revolutionary who wants to merk your pops real bad actually looks like.

Cortina is the name the bishop gives her under the arched hallows and pain of death. With raised placating hands armed only with a rosary, he sends a prayer to his god for forgiveness. It had taken some coaxing to break the sacred seal of confession- but only some. Evident in the cathedral rectory smelling only of incense, not gunpowder. The holy fonts and oils remained unbloodied and still.

“Ignacio Cortina.” She lowers her weapon, practices the traitor’s name. “Ignacio Cortina.” A simple, middling name; the favored disguise of evil. It is also powerful, a knowledge she has long waited to gain. Again and again, it falls from her lips. A different sort of invocation, one absent absolution.

The bishop knows her name as well, the name her mother called her. Calls it out to her as she retreats through the vaulted tezontle corridors towards the apse and past the altar. He wants to save her soul, or so she supposes. Even as he vows to aid her cause beyond turning a blind eye to her threats or her children rifling about, filling their bellies with communion wafers, he exalts his Lord in calling her His unwitting righteous servant.

Foolish, really. She knows exactly what she is doing, and whom she is doing it for.

“Your brother,” he says, and to that she pauses. She must. Turns around and finds the bishop looming over a stone vessel. “He would have been baptized here. The same as you.” Running his hands over the white stone vessel his hands shake, as does his voice- as if to think of such horrors could rock even a pillar of the Lord. Adelita’s hands lay still over the molded bath, fingers straight. The baptismal is low and cold as a  headstone. Empty and damp to the touch. Too small for the round, chubby baby she remembers. But he had been much smaller much smaller in pieces.

Cortina. Cortina. Cortina.

It's a funeral hymn. It’s a psalm chanting in her veins. Louder and louder than the bishop as he blesses her. Tells her to go with God. If Adelita had heard him, she would be sure the Holy Father was unmoved; left behind amongst the pews and the pulpit where unburning candles sit in reverence to a disappointed Savior.

* * *

The bishop is true to his word. Pablo finds the traitor in a half mornings work before the sun is high over the desert and they have to erect the canvasses to keep the generators from overheating.

The false American name, Felipe Reyes, is attached to a business, a tax record, a stolen set of numbers. The three-decade paper trail is spread thin. No arrests. No warrants. His blood-thirst seemingly left in his native lands. Though if the man is the one and the same, then the fool Cortina never ventured further than Santo Padre. Adelita knows it would be so easy to call _la migra_. Spoof a number from across the border, tip the authorities off to war criminal in their midst. But he would be locked up in a year's worth of petitions and holdings before she got to him. Perhaps even the new regime would have him answer for his crimes.

But that right belongs to Adelita alone.

She tells Pablo to dig deeper, despite knowing the task is in vain. Killers who live as long as Cortina don’t do so by accident. Old age from a world such as theirs requires a concession to the humble, a retirement to inconspicuous drudgery. Instead, Pablo should be tracking cargo freights or serial numbers or re-encoding their remote transceivers. There are mouths to feed, weapons to construct, plans for the oncoming wave of crackdown violence from the impotent but needlessly self-important _federales_. All to say nothing of the battle ahead with the cartel. But these things are dwarfed by the pixelated and weathered visage in the American license photo. The image burned alongside the name in the soft matter of her brain. The decades etched heavily into the man’s skin; stolen years from stolen lives.

Pablo finds her at sunset in her tent divvying up gun oil and ammunition, shamefaced and sorry with a sad little sheaf of paper. There was nothing to find on Ignacio Cortina save for a bank loan, a truck registration, one late wife, two grown sons; one incarcerated and the other-

* * *

Angel Reyes is a bandit. A Yankee cowboy with a loud metal horse that he straddles like a lover. It smokes the way he does, spreading choppy exhaust over the cigarette butts he’s dropped as it idles. There’s a polish to the silver, a gleam in the longhorn handles seen even in the lowlight parking garage. A fresh coat of wax and not a speck of rust to the piping. Yet the rucksack blanket roll mounted to the headpiece is threadbare. His strapped helmet scuffed in more places than it isn’t. Not a man of details save for his motorized machismo.

He isn’t riding alone. A gang of other men riding decelerates alongside him, chattering and spirited. The son of Cortina is wild-hearted, at home among his kind. Each wears a uniform, cut vests of black leather and inked tattoos. None of them are watching out. All of them laughing, boasting, strings of English and Spanish in odd _Americano_ accents.

“Who are they?” Mini asks eyes to the front of their parked car. She is sitting on top of a stack of magazines. Still so small, but glancing closely from the side view mirrors. Such a good little mouse, so well taught.

“They are the Mayans M.C.” Adelita watches without watching as the son of Cortina kicks up his stand, follows lead and motors off. “They are the dogs of the cartel… and evidence that God is laughing at us.”

Mini wrinkles her nose, confused. The burn scarring her face folds the wrong way as she does. She doesn’t ask any more questions and the Mayans roll out in formation.

* * *

They meet. It takes some doing. Reyes is never alone. His dog pack stands apart from the crowd but they ride together. Always moving in a huddle or horde.

But Reyes gets cocky. Wanders off through the market carts, trading American money for goods and drink then doubles back through an alley. This is how he is cornered by another player, twice his size and equally hungry. Adelita would guess him to be a territorial gangster or random mugging. Instead, it seems personal from the way the man holds chest thrust out, his elbows wide from his body. As she closes in she hears his snapping jeers, a list of complaints: a night laborer who takes issue with Reyes’ leather vest. Ah, one of the old movers for cartel heroin. All of whom, from what Adelita gathered, were displeased to be demoted from border checkpoint runners to factory packers by thugs on bikes who got the job done better. Adelita watches Reyes do nothing to diffuse the altercation. Pulls out a pistol, levels it sideways, extinguishing the other man’s gangster bravado. But it's Adelita who swings the blow that takes the fool down. It’s as good an introduction as any.

Reyes gives the downed man a quizzical assessment, kicking his shoulder, then a shrug when he doesn’t get up again. Takes one long, long look at Adelita. Something mirthful in his stare, watching too closely; the way that men do.

She doesn't take his eye for it.

“My hero,” his quips, stowing his gun. If he notices her little birds surrounding him at either end of the alley, he doesn’t show it.

“Don’t be so generous. We’ve been looking for this animal for some time,” she lies, her children catching on quickly. They drag the man by his arms and legs out into broad daylight. No one stops them.

“You,” he starts, wagging a finger at her. She can see the realization spinning in his head. A simple man. Such transparent eyes. “I know you. They call you La Adelita. The one-woman revolution.”

There’s a tinge of wonder to his voice, lips parted, and oh. He is handsome. And worse, he knows it. “You’re the one going apeshit on the cartels. I saw those burnt out freights you left off the highway near the city limits. And I must say,” he pressed his fingers and thumb to his left, smacks a kiss with an exaggerated flourish in the air in some sort of American gesture she does not understand, “beautiful work.”

“And you're the one pushing their poison to the north,” Adelita accuses, agitated by his cavalier admiration- no, mockery? “The foot soldiers of the Galindo cartel.”

His smirk diminishes only fractionally. “I’m a Maya.” He says it as if bragging, with a burning pride beneath. “Nothing more, nothing less.”

“You’re the friend of my enemy,” she steps close. He’s an enthusiastic fool, chomping at the bit for a challenge. For vindication. It’s all in his shit eating grin. “One who has seen my face, who knows the bounty on any one of my rebels.”

“The business partner of your enemy,” he corrects, not taking any of her other bait. Whatever it is that made up the son of Cortina, perhaps it does not have a price tag. He isn’t in this for the money.

Adelita tilts her head. Recalibrates. “You need better business partners.”

There’s a solemn moment eked out at his eyes, somehow darker now than they were before. “Si, senorita. I really do.”

* * *

They huddle around an oil drum, feeding the flame scraps and papers for fuel. The moon is on the rise above and a chill has settled over the cloister behind the old tin factory. There Angel Reyes walks among her people, eyes sharp but drinking from their bottles and cups. Adelita cannot decide if he is that careless or pretending.

“Tell me, Angel Reyes, why shouldn’t we leave your body in the desert where no one will ever find it?”

“You’re a real sweet talker, you know that.” He hands her his cup. Isn’t satisfied until she drinks deep. He’s watching her mouth. She’s watching his hands. He warms them close to the fire, hand over palm. They are calloused with splits at the seamed skin over his knuckles. He’s a brawler, built for it with a broad chest and well-fed. “I got no love for the cartel, and nothing but mad respect for your operation.”

Adelita does not know what to make of that. It is becoming clearer and clearer with every sip that Angel Reyes is quite dully straightforward. She isn’t being played. But he also does not have a long game.

“You see this cut,” he hooks his thumbs under his leather vest, “you know what it means?”

“ _Eres un bandido_.”

“That’s right. An outlaw. No country or cartel can change that. Our ends are the only ends. For our club. Brotherhood.”

Adelita feeds more brush to the fire. She wonders if the son of Cortina knows who he is. That he is the blood of a traitor who happily left his own sworn, sacred brother to die on unawares, to watch his wife and only son be slashed to meat and blood and stink. “You’re a big talker, Angel Reyes. And a fool.”

“A fortunate fool,” he insists.

“How so?”

“You haven't killed me yet.” It’s another jest, but his lips are pressed tight together, his brows pulling in. He shakes his head from side to side, words dying on his lips before he brings himself to speak. “I understand this fight of yours. I do,” he insists, gauging her unimpressed reaction. “Los Olvidados and the cartel, it's a long time coming. I know it needs to be fought. But that fight it ain't got nothing to do with the Mayans.”

Adelita can’t help but scoff. “You want to protect your gang from the fallout.”

It's not a gang. It's a club. And yeah, why shouldn’t I? The Mayans never massacre families or burned down any towns. We don't kill women. We don't hurt children. We don't cut off heads or any of that crazy fucking execution style bullshit.”

He was not wrong. The grislier horrors could not be laid at the feet of his M.C. “That may be. But you are apart of this. A part of the cartel. You move his poison. You protect his money. Do you deny this?”

Reyes turns away casting his gaze back into the flames. “I do it because I made promises. Promises to a man who made promises of his own, stacked on top of somebody else's fucking promises.” She sees it then. Reyes is frayed, bone-weary from the weight of his own admission. A maze of conflict and confidences leading deeper, hindering already unmet needs. “I know you got an army. And I know you got ends of your own. I know it feels a lot like justice-”

“It is justice,” Adelita doesn’t catch the words before they seize in her chest, rising in her throat. Unsure if it is the Mayan or the Cortina in him that drags it out of her, she steps back. Ties a stone to the flailing of her heart and lets it sink.

“I don’t doubt that.” Reyes is stern, serious. He pulls back as well. Had they truly been standing so close? He swallows whatever he is about to say next and splashes some of his drink into the fire. It flares high, then recedes. “It’s heavy, ain't it?”

He doesn’t mean the alcohol.

“ _Mi gente, mi familia_. You're right, we’re not innocent," he bites his lip, face pinched and narrow and searching "but that doesn’t mean we’re your enemies, either.”

She watches him shuffle where he stands. A flesh and blood contradiction. A bandit with no freedom bargaining for that which he does not deserve. “Just men with promises.” He nods, and Adelita wonders, were Cortina’s eyes as dark and his? Did they shine in the firelight, earnest, despondent? Had her father and his ever shared such a night?

“A war is coming. There will only be two sides. The rebellion, and the defeated.” A finality settles over them. She knows he feels it too. “You could be more than your promises, Angel Reyes. You could make the choice not to be our enemy.”

“Rebels and outlaws,” is all he says with a rueful last look between them. “Ain’t got allegiances, but we got loyalty.”

Adelita’s English is good, but there is a nuance here she does not quite parse out. But whatever is lost in translation, she what she hears a ‘no’. That is when she squares back. Signals to her little rabbits, the foxes, her birds.

Then Reyes swings back the rest of his cup. Saunters away. “I’m gonna walk out of here,” he says. “Maybe when I turn my back you blindside me and no one ever sees me again. Or maybe you don’t,” he pauses. Turns for one look at Adelita, “and maybe you see me again real soon.”

And then he is gone.

Adelita slowly raises her left hand, palm out, thumb crossed. Her command revoked. Between the cause and Cortina, Adelita is not finished with Angel Reyes.

* * *

Real soon is a fortnight and a half. After moving and relocating their camp. Scheduling gun trainings and tech shipments and trading bribes to the police and pulling strings with the bishop. Real soon is him shuffling through the plaza, looking up. Seeing her atop a balcony stair. She wonders how his eyes found hers so quickly. Then disappears through the alleyways. He follows as she hoped. But not only him.

There are footsteps behind her, gaining too quickly to be Reyes. Her birds are in the distance, scavenging, and preparing. She is alone between the barred windows and waste bins and clotheslines. Her transceiver still tuned to a downed channel. Her knife cannot take them all.

That is when the others descend on her, fists and rope and a pistol. Fists bent in rage and revenge. More Galindo factory packers who know without Los Olvidados the cartel wouldn’t outpost their security to the likes of the Mayans. That they would not lose a cent of the dirty money lining their pockets. They converge on her, jeering and fast. But Reyes is faster.

He has two of them in the dirt; first, the one with the gun twisted into a painful oblong angle, then shoving him back into his fellow attacker. Reyes fires the gun once, missing the bastards but noise alone sends the mob running. The third and bravest of the lot stand his ground. He ends up painting the stucco grout with his face, Reyes grinding his head locked body against it into a streak of yowling and red.

Real soon is his all to proud fucking grin, taking her by the elbow as they move, move, move. Leaning in close he asks her, “do I pass muster? Or do really need to test me with more of Galindo’s goons?”

That is the first time Angel Reyes makes her laugh. Disbelief in her fortune finding the fool son of Cortina. It is the first time she is overestimated by any man; his belief that she had orchestrated everything, that her little rabbits were never too far or too thinly spread to swoop in and save her.

Real soon is her never telling him that he saved her life.

* * *

After, Adelita meets a pair of his Mayan brothers. Two Americans in identical patched jackets yet total opposites in every other regard. Cruz is dour, to say the least. He does not want to be there. Impatient, lank, greasy, he never stops smoking as he sizes her up. He is also as rude as he is severe, viciously mocking anything he sees under his breath; even the smallest of her rabbits. He must have been brought up by fighting dogs, or worse.

Alongside him is Lopez who is round and content. Sweetly mannered, he asks a few pleasantries; taking notice of the orphans and the off-grid transponders. Clearly, he was raised right, from the way he shakes her hand and never stares at her breasts. How he landed in this life of violence and banditry she can only imagine.

“Patriotism,” Reyes explains. “He served two tours. Same as Coco.”

“And now who do they serve, Senor Reyes?”

“The promise of something better,” Reyes shrugs. “Let's get to work.”

* * *

They come to terms. They work fast. Reyes is the point man to everything. Lopez and Cruz maintain distance. If everything burns to the ground, Reyes wants them away from the fallout. The play belongs to Reyes alone.

From there, Reyes never misses a drop point or a coded message. He has suggestions even, left in near-illegible notes of maps with routes he has scratched and scratched in pen. They aren’t terrible suggestions. In fact, most are quite good. His road-ready approach continues to advance in its uses by the day. Stone-faced, she never lets him see more than an approving nod in the semicircular they form at the central hub of the main tent. This proved to be the wisest course of action, because later in the heart of Santa Madre when the Mayans tap the city waterline to siphon Los Olvidados clean fresh water, she smiles. A scant expression, a frail upturning at the corner of her mouth. It’s all he needs, apparently.

Reyes beams back, proud of himself, the same way he is when he proclaims himself a Mayan. Talks and talks, over-explaining the metal apparatus she's never seen before; “-that’s how you tap the main sleeve, turning here with the joint, and then tie it off before, at the uh- whatchamacallit.”

“Whatchama-?” Adelita asks.

“The coupling, Casanova,” mocks Cruz, shaking his head and stubbing his cigarette in a puddle forming beneath one of their ten-gallon jugs. Lopez simply rolls his kind eyes in a hopeless, pitying look for his friend who’s face hangs slightly lower, not meeting her eye.

Adelita does not know what a Casanova is, but she does want to know more about diverting pipe flow and regauging the water pressures to hide their tracks. So she leans in close and lets Reyes talk her through the movements, slow and sure once more. Takes tools from Lopez one by one until Adelita learns the names of each and hands them to Reyes herself. He does not stutter or stumble from there. All that he lacks in words made up for by his concise, fluent hands.

* * *

Reyes does not hide anything. Ever brash and loud as his motorcycle. If he were to betray her she would see it coming. If he had learned who she truly was to him, she would foresee that as well. Instead, they carry on, from mission to objective, on and on and so forth. She never asks how he disguises his absences and doubled workload from his club, from his family, or whatever girls he must keep at home in California. No matter who skilled he is in misdirection, no matter how street savvy, eventually someone must notice eventually. She sees him often and more often still as they grow closer to their goals. Each win is another gain in momentum, spurning quicker movements, more reactions from the cartel. They are alone together more and more, running operations.

If she did not know better, she would think he likes these moments best; with Cruz and Lopez back north and the freedom to linger close, locked in step as they move through the Santa Madre square, and closer still through the desert footpaths to the base-camp. Always loudly projecting, watching her for a sign she cannot possibly give.

He has grown too valuable. Their work too important. Yet it still surprises her how quickly she decides would not kill Angel Reyes.

It isn’t until he is helping her dig through desert rock that he mentions his brother between shovel fulls. In their shared hours under the sweltering sun to build tent groundings, she had forgotten that Angel Reyes did not belong to her. That he was the blood of the enemy. A first born son, something sacred she could take from Cortina.

“You remind me of him is all,” Reyes says, forlorn but half smiling. There are smudges of dirt and sweat across his brow. He wipes at it with his hand but only makes it worse. “Your mind is always going, three steps ahead of the rest of us. No one ever knows what you're thinking."

"I'm thinking of all the best ways to end you," is her admission. The charade could be over in an instant. Blood for blood.

Angel just chuckles, rests his chin on the handle of his shovel and simpers a small smile at her. "You even sound just like him. That and… EZ, he- he was real quiet too, after.”

Adelita lowers her shovel. “After what?”

“After our mother died.”

“How?” Adelita asks, knowing full well already. But she wants to push on this hurt, rattle him. Make him stop looking at her with such wanting eyes.

“A robbery gone bad,” he says simply. It’s a practiced sentence. Not from having cause to tell many people his mother’s fate. But because it is what he has to tell himself. “Bad as it could go.”

“I’m sure she was quite a woman.”

“She was,” Reyes taps his shoulder tattoo of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Adelita had never realized before that it was in her honor. “Losing her was hard on all of us. But it was worst for EZ.” His voice trails and his eyes follow after sinking with a ache that feels too familiar. She knows the animal by its tracks, knows how it flies loose from its snare. That if she got her hands around its neck she could pull apart the sinews and empty organs and name each dissected piece by piece; grief, grief, and grief.

Adelita has to repress a panging urge she feels; to apologize, to confess, to debate how she might miss the longing in his eyes now that they are downcast and subdued.

Reyes picks up his shovel, digs in again with a ferocious jab. The metal clangs against something denser. When the shovel lifts away an exposed vein of black stone glitters in the sun.

“ _Obsidiana_ ,” she shows him, holding out a dark swirled shard. “The true Maya worshiped these stones.” The black surface rebounds light, casting back daggers from its many jagged and pointed faces. This is why she should have warned him to handle with care. When he takes it from her, he winces. It cut a swath of skin through the bed of his palm. He drops the stone. “They used it for flint and spearheads.”

“Smart,” Reyes chides, and Adelita takes his hand. He does not protest as she orients his fingers to stretch open his hand, even as he winces again. Then she pulls back her hair to lean forward. Places two wet, wet kisses to the slow bleed of his hand.

“Saliva will seal the wound faster,” she promises, rising up again. Angel doesn't withdraw his hand. He does not move an inch. He looks and he looks and he looks, and what he sees Adelita cannot know. Her growing sunburn, or the frayed strands of her hair, or the still slick rim of her mouth. She isn't so weak that she squirms under his gaze or the crinkle at his eyes he casts down at her. But she feels something else encroach upon them. An ever closing distance. It is her that has to turn away; unsatisfied, but passive to it. Thankful at least that his features have forgotten to agonize over his wounds or that broken heart she can smell radiating off of him.

She picks up her shovel again. He follows suit.

* * *

Adelita still has Pablo give her any and all updates he can on Ignacio Cortina, the man otherwise known as Felipe Reyes. In all of their surveillance the only trace he leaves behind is a visit to Stockton California State Prison. Adelita remembers only then that Ezekiel Reyes is not dead. His brother only speaks of him with the same loss and the same regret as their mother. As if they are both gone in the same manner; neither ever to return to him. Cortina is a ghost otherwise; visits no one, travels nowhere, calls no one, not even Angel's mobile phone. Does nothing except authorize coupons to be printed in the local paper for his butcher shop. Adelita still dreams of killing him in said shop, with hacking knives and freezer hooks, until she learns that is where Marisol Reyes was found. Dead, head bashed in, still warm but empty of life.

When Adelita kills Ignacio Cortina she will leave him somewhere his eldest son will not find him first.

* * *

Adelita learns slowly that it was when the Galindo cartel changed hands from father to son that the handshakes between the Mayans and the Mexico supplier began to chafe. Miguel Galindo had no respect, and thus no honor. He did not greet his fellow men as brothers. Instead, as workhorses and attack dogs and vermin.

“The club pulls in work he can’t handle himself,” Reyes explains, spiteful in tone. “Then he spits on us for getting dirty to do it his dirty work. He thinks we’re below him because some rich white guy gave him a degree and let him buy land from the government.”

“But you went along with it, Senor Reyes. Got paid and kept your promises.” She half smiles at him. But for once he doesn’t return it.

“The money ain't worth the disgrace,” he says, serious and fraught even. “If I hadn’t met you, I would have found some other way to fight it.”

She remembers then what he asked her before. _It’s heavy, ain't it?_ And she sees it now. The tightness in his shoulders, a taut cord for a throat. He’s holding up a crumbling house on his back, hoping to save as much as he can before there’s nothing left.

“I could remind that there were other ways,” she remarks, “like the mules and movers are always saying, it’s Los Olvidados that keep the pressure on the cartel. When we aren’t subservient, the cartels resort to bloodshed.”

“Yeah, what’s your point?”

“Some would say backing the cartel to wipe us out would have been a cleaner victory.” Reyes looks at her, startled by the suggestion. She doesn’t look away, does not give an inch. “Not only that but a bigger payday.”

Reyes turns away from her, around the camp, at the children, the elders, the nuns. From tent to tent, over the bags of rice and corn, the stolen coffee maker that Mini steals bags of cafe from the American brand shops for Pablo and her. “If the options are  taking Galindo down a peg or fighting against women and children and cripples,” Reyes scoffs, “I know I made the right choice.”

In the distance, Cruz kicks the back hatch of a four-wheel drive. The rusted door screeches open. He and Lopez unload before he shouts something obscene again at Reyes.

“I do not believe your friend thinks he made the right choice.”

“Don’t mind Coco. He’s just- being here makes him,” Reyes spins his pointer finger around his ear. “It’s hard, is all. Being in a desert, a camp full of war plans, around kids with guns. Brings up a lot of bad shit for him. Shit he thought he left in the middle east… what?” Reyes asks, watching her face. The mask of indifference slipping down, realization becoming apparent.

“I did not know. About your friend. Or his hardships” she says, shame rising in her. “I thought he was only… very unpleasant.”

“Oh, no. He is,” Reyes assures her. “Coco’s a fucking asshole. The biggest you’ll ever meet.”

Adelita laughs despite herself.

“But neither of them wanted to go to war again. Not against kids. That’s how I got them here in the first place… Yeah, I heard you! I’m coming!” Reyes yells as Cruz continues to shout and rudely gesture with his middle finger.

* * *

Mini catches Adelita smiling to herself long after the Mayans had packed up and moved on back up the border. She calls Angel her _novio_.

Adelita shushes her.

But it’s Pablo’s quiet, worried look that phases her. Pablo, who she has ordered into life or death situations, under fire and desperation and threat of imprisonment. And he has never once looked at her with anything close to the wearisome, concern he harbors now.

She’s getting too close.

* * *

Reyes brings medicine. Crates and crates of medicine, stacks tall in the back of two trucks he and Lopez had to drive separately. Cruz is crammed in the back not having room upfront. He shoves the boxes of antibiotics in Pablo’s hands. And Adelita who hasn’t moved since the Mayans pulled up, cannot keep her eyes from widening, her or her voice from the shock.

“How.”

“We sort of stole it. Donations to a-"

She shoves him. “You stole this?” she all but shouts, “from a hospital?” He is twice her size and she can barely move him. He grips her at the elbows, steadies the both of them before they hit the ground. If she had been looking for an excuse to detach herself from the man, this was it. 

“From a warehouse,” Reyes answers, hurt but steady. “Under lock and key where it was collecting dust, not helping anybody.”

Adelita steps back on her heel. "Does America just have mountains of medicine going nowhere?"

“The donations were to some charity but they never got there," Reyes explains. "It was in the papers. Some genius checked the expiration dates and then somebody's lawyer said they would be unethical to, to dispose-”

“Distribute-” Lopez corrects.

“To distribute,” Reyes moves on, pushing through his embarrassment. “We heard about it and we thought-”

“We?” Jabs Cruz, scoffing. He is still heaving boxes. Always in a rush to leave.

“-I thought maybe there's bandages or something you could use. But look,” Reyes rifles through the boxes. “The dates on em are still good. Years left on some of these. It doesn’t make sense until you see what's missing-” Reyes hands her a register. “None of the morphine or oxy is anywhere to be found.”

Ah. Corruption. “Of course,” muses Adelita. “Lie about the condition of the medicine, withhold the shipment, sell the narcotics.”

“They missed some of the fentanyl patches,” Lopez tells Pablo helpfully, who is sorting through fever reducers and vitamins.

“We can get the rest of this to the hospitals,” Pablo declares. There is a begrudging hope in his eye. He shakes Reyes’ hand even, staring him down in a new light.

It is the effect Reyes has on people. Drawing in people who know better. Adelita speaks from experience.

* * *

Days later, Adelita watches from the hallways of the nearest clinic, where a nurse is plying a battered woman with some of the antiseptics they had brought.  The surroundings are far from sterile, the wall panels are dented and mildew-ridden. The administration has been thinly staffed. Initially hesitant to accept their goods. She wore them down when they saw what she had to offer.

The bedridden patient lets out a small cry. Her body sags with relief. The nurse rubs her brow, promising everything would be better now.

“You’re an angel, my child,” a haggard doctor tells her later, gratitude pouring out of him. Adelita turns heel and leaves without a second look. Pushes out the backdoors, into the high heat of the noonday sun. Thinks how frivolous it is, the lengths she goes to avoid that word. How the sound of his name sets her heart racing. It's only in her weakest moments, after his departures that she let herself think to refer to him by his name. In privacy, in safety, he could be her Angel. Otherwise, he was Reyes to his face. _El hijo de Cortina_ to Pablo. _No es mi novio_ , to Mini.

Suppression was a tool of great use, but self-deception was dangerous. Pretending Angel was only one thing to her at any one time had grown beyond taxing. The whole of it and the whole of the man had begun to blur together. He as the means to both of her plans had converged into something more. The two wars she waged for past and for future had collided into the doubtful present.

The least Adelita could do was call the man who could ruin everything by his God-given name.

* * *

Of course, he notices. He notices everything about her. “Sorry, say that again?” he insists, the pair of them sitting at a small table in the back of a restaurant. It is near the north of the city limits, family run by supporters of the cause. A courier has agreed to meet them here. He had told her to order whatever she wanted on his American dollar, and she didn’t have the heart to tell him she could eat the entire kitchen for free if she wanted.

“Please pass the sugar, Angel. _El azúcar_?”

“I’m sorry, repeat the part with my name again,” he hands her the sugar. She spoons the rounded grains into her coffee. “Come on, just once. I thought you were going to call me Senor Reyes until-”

“Angel,” she repeats, not in English, but with the softened consonants of their mother tongue. He melts at the sound of it, like the sugar in her steaming cup. She thinks for a moment he might ask her for her real name. That she might even tell him. But he just smirks, and their food comes. They eat together and care very little about the courier's postponed arrival two courses later.

* * *

She rides on his bike once and only once. He holds his hand out when she is apprehensive. Tells her it is faster to their destination by his bike than by truck. She only needs to trust him. And she does; does trust him and does ride along with him, astonished by the world opening up beneath their wheels. The way the sky and the asphalt are endless and the moment balloons up inside her until there is finally enough time. Time to feel, time to forget to feel. To forget in transit from departure to arrival that she is a leader, a matron, an orphan, a killer, a liar. That she must be all of these things all of the time. One day she will have show Angel how much so. But not now, not then, with her arms around his body and his helmet strapped her head. He hadn’t had a spare but he insisted she take it and she relented, letting him steer her outbound and away.

* * *

When Mini asks her if Angel ever kisses her, she wonders briefly if mini knows too much of adult matters. If there are still things Mini has not told her about her time before Los Olvidados found her. Adelita hopes she is worrying too much. That Mini simply knows Adelita too well or that Angel's affections are simply that obvious even to a child.

Adelita shoos her troublesome rabbit away, telling her no kisses her. Mini returns to her bedroll, making puckered kissy faces as she goes.

* * *

Adelita was never prone to flights of attachment. She was far too reserved to understand the gravity between bodies. Not the way that others spoke of it. Not the way her father had held her mother time and time again until neither of them had had hands.

She imagined it was simply not a need for her. Not the way it was for others who drank of sex like water or ate the fruit of it for sustenance. The others, even her stern, dedicated Pablo made the frequent pilgrimage to the brothels. Adelita has always abstained. Not out of purity. She's bedded down with men, finding passing pleasure or in worse cases for practicality. But it was never something as profoundly terrible as a longing. As answering a call to explore, to be seen. To touch the cleft of his chin, his beard, or to taste of his mouth until he stopped talking. To find if she tucks perfectly beneath the crook of his chin as she had imagined. If the divots of her body are filled by the convexity of his.

* * *

Angel brings food and Adelita does not even question it. His gifts have been a routine since his recruitment. He comes alone, without Cruz or Lopez. Driving up with bags of rice and corn strapped into the passenger's seats. The trunk filled with and coolers stacked with cheese and meat.

Her little ones cannot remember the last time they had meat that wasn't stolen scraps. They spend the evening, nibbling cheese and grinding maize and skewering the meat, using the last of their onions and peppers that were going to waste.

Adelita lets Angel prepare her a plate. He mentions in passing that the club had a big payout. He put most of the money into the food run for Los Olivdados. For her.

Adelita has a mouth full of fire-spitted steak chunk when Angel mentions all the meats had come from his very own father’s _carniceria_. Adelita swallows hard and tries not to vomit.

Instead, she smiles up at Angel, who is patient and kind even when she lies and tells him she is full, that she is exhausted and must retire for the night.

Sensing a change he pulls at her wrist. She lets him. It is exhausting what she feels for him. Her wild wolf of a biker who seemed to only want to curl at her feet like a dog, never once hiding an ounce of yearning. He strokes her pulse with his thumb. Through it, she can imagine his heartbeat, right alongside hers.

“It is heavy,” she says all at once. Answer a question she had not understood long ago. He nods. He follows after her at her beckoning. She easing into his rambling gait, his gaze, his gentle machismo. She leads him to his truck. He is beginning to say something when she cut him off. “You should go. And you shouldn’t return.”

He stops. Eyes twisted in confusion. And then hurt. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“You’ve proven yourself,” her voice is level, plain. “As far as Los Olvidados is concerned, the Mayans M.C. _es exonerado_. No rebel will shed Mayan blood.” At that Angel laughs, but not with his eyes. It is a terrible sound. Adelita hates it. “You may go in peace. And know you and yours are safe.” She opens his truck door, but he slams it shut. It’s loud enough that her little rabbits scurry close. She raises her hand, palm out, thumb crossed. They back off and return to their meal.

“We’re not done here.” He all but grinds his boot heels into the dirt.

“You wanted a future for your club," she reminds him. "You’ve earned it, now go-”

“That’s fucking bullshit. Why are you doing this?” He has his hands on her shoulders. Too close, always too damned close. “We could lose all of this,” he gestures to the camp he had helped her build, to the provisions he had helped her acquire, the food, the medicine, “all of what we’ve worked for here could go up in smoke if we stop now. And aren’t you tired of losing everything?”

He may well have slapped her across the face. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You lost your family.” He says it without hindrance or guile, as unadorned as he spoke of his own mother. “I don’t know how, or who, or why. But I just know what the damage looks like.”

“Oh, do you?” She spits. Her face is burning, hands clenching to white fists.

“It looks like crawling out a crashed heap. Pulling yourself from the roadside with everything twisted and busted inside you but you _keep going_ ," he's vehement, bent low to her face. "You don't fucking quit. You keep dragging your body marker mile by marker mile to nowhere and nobody because you can't stop. Not yet-”

"You can, Angel! You can stop. You and yours can live. I can't give you anything else."

“This is my play, my risk. Everything we've done, all we still gotta do- I ain't going back on that.”

“You don’t know what you’ve risked being here-” she doesn’t shout, no matter how much she wants to. Instead, hissing at him in harsh whispers and it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. He won't hear her either way.

“You told me before that you believed I could be more- more than a man with promises,” his voice is unsure, unsteady but gaining, “a man of choices… And this is my choice. Why you can't accept that?”

“Not from you.”

“Why not me?”

She doesn't answer him, but he still holds her hand. And it's clearest then why she must make him leave. How he can pull her towards him and her body will simply let him. His calluses trace her scars, her veins. Braising the lines of her palm the way her mother had when she chased her through the house to see what trinket she was hiding in her hands. She finds his marks in return, the healed over scar from the jagged obsidian they had found weeks before. The wound she had kissed to seal.

But it is this kind of tenderness that could split her open from seam to seam, her brittle edges catching fire at the draw of his flint dark eyes. Like a scalpel, like shrapnel, there is a spearhead exploring her underbelly for the softest parts of her that yet remain. Parts she thought she had shed when the world forgot the name Luisa Espina. When she had forged Adelita in her place.

She wants to grab Angel by the hair, pull his head back and kiss him, pour the truth into him like poison. Tell him how she is a threat to everything he loves. The price she means to exact from his bloodline, for the pain she will cause him. How fucking dare he love her so gently?

But Adelita does none of that. Opens the car door, pulls down the keys he keeps behind the visor and watches him go until his headlines are dying embers in the distance.

* * *

She returns to the Bishop. Slides into confessional like her mother used to do. She doesn't weep or wail or wring her hands in prayer. Instead, she seethes. Still and silent in a way that makes the Bishop restless. If she did not have so much to preoccupy her, she would think him guilty of hiding something.

“Is Ignacio dead?” He cuts in, impatient.

Angel has replaced the sound of Cortina’s name in her head. The hard American pronunciation louder some nights even than the slick squelch sound of meat pulled from bone or the last of her baby brother’s cries.

Angel. Angel. Angel.

Angel and his boorish laugh, his raunch. His calluses and gentle touch. His considerate movements, his needy gestures. His wild abandon and terrible pronunciation. His tools and his bike and his heady touch under her elbow, at the small of her back. His tall heart to rival an obelisk of the true Mayan. One that had been whittled down and rebuilt again, stone reduced to rubble, the rubble to a desert. He kept the pebbles of it in his pocket, handing the pieces away without fear. Promises, promises, promises.

“I could spare him,” she says to no one. Not to the Bishop. Not to God.

“Cortina divulged your father’s greatest secret. The location of his family-”

“Not him. His son. I could spare his son. I could spare him the truth, the violence, the loss. Is revenge not a sin? The greed of it?” She cannot remember the last time she had this much to say, the words pour out, escaping the fires of her hatred and need at last. “We are so close to victory over the cartel. I can taste it, can sink my teeth into it almost. How can I think of anything else? With thousands of lives and thousands of names depending on me. But it’s Cortina I want to think about. His son. I should be saving my people. Putting down the rest of the promises and choose-”

Choose him. Angel.

“You want to cast aside the promise you made to your family? Over their very souls?”

No. She hadn’t promised anything on their souls. She had laid it over the bloody dregs of their bodies on the kitchen floor.

“I had hoped that you were a servant of God.” The Bishop departs his section of the confessional. His footsteps recede into the halls of the cathedral.

She leaves soon after, heavier than before.

* * *

Mini curls in Adelita’s lap most nights, asking where her _novio_ has gone. Adelita pinches her for her frisky nature and lets her hair be brushed by little hands. Mini still chatters about the meal from days past. About how when they destroy the cartels, they will eat like that every night. And then she promises Adelita’s _novio_ can return to her.

* * *

When Angel reappears, she is prepared to send him away. To sic her rabbits on him if he doesn’t. Send him back into the night, retreating to America and his freedom of her. But something is wrong. He doesn't saunter, nor does he rush, but he teeters on the edge of it. Trying to hide an urgency.

The closer he gets the more she catalogs him. The differences from when she saw him last and the him she thought she would never see again. His hair is shorter and beard untrimmed. He has a new tattoo along his arm under the rolled up plaid sleeves under his cut. She hopes the bandage over his veins of his elbow isn’t evidence of a new penchant for Galindo’s heroin. That’s why the shaking of his hands and red-rimmed eyes set her heart flailing in her chest.

Has he been exposed? Is it Lopez? Cruz?

“I know you don’t want me here but-” he starts. And his voice is terrible and weak. Like gravel in his throat. He isn’t looking at her. It is always a terrible sign when he looks away. Otherwise, he never runs out of excuses to see her.

“ _¿Que pasó? ¿Qué está mal? Respóndeme_ -”

Angel wipes at his face, grinds the heel of his palms to his eye sockets. She wrenches his arms away and he looks at her with an unfocused gaze and slack mouth. “I can’t make it stop,” he says to her. He means the shaking of his hands. He shivers even in the warm humid night air and lets out a noise that could almost be a laugh. “I could barely steer but I had to. I had come-”

“You did the right thing,” she tells him, no matter how stupid it was for him to drive in this state.

“I just can’t wrap my mind around it. I always thought if it ever happened,” Angel pursed his lips, shook his head, speaks through a long exhalation, “I would be so fucking happy. I thought- I’m just scared it isn’t real.”

“Angel, you are in shock,” she realizes. Guiding him to set alongside the tents they had erected. The vein of _obsidiana_  they discovered still glimmers in the moonlight. She thinks about fetching a rock to pinch between his fingers. Use pain to snap him out of this incoherent stupor.

“They’re letting him out,” Angel states, sparing her such drastic measures. “I just found out. A couple days and he’s-”

“Ezekiel? He’s coming home?”

Angel nods. Smiles weakly before huffing out a jagged laugh. “Say that again,” and there he is. A spark behind his voice.

“Your brother is coming home,” she smiles. It’s forced, but he doesn’t notice. Because no matter what she feels for him- and she does- they are words no one will ever say to her.

Yet she can’t begrudge even the son of Cortina this happiness. Not when it seems she has spoken a magic word or made the entire happenings more believable. Because Angel jumps to his feet. A man in repossession of himself and thrumming with excitement.

“He’s really coming home. I’m getting him back. I’m getting my family back.”

Adelita shouldn’t ask it but it will weigh on her if she does not. “Your father never left you, Angel. You see him, don’t you? All the time?”

Angel sighs, smiles bright and bitter. “Yeah, I see him. But he’s not there. He’s with Ma. He’s with EZ. Any room he and I are in- he’s gone.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s- it’s a long story, and it’s stupid- I’m stupid and I’m sorry I didn’t think about laying all this at your feet… I should have thought about how you would feel talkin’ about family shit-”

Adelita grabs Angel by the chin, pulling at his jaw. She commands him, “tell me everything.”

So he does. Angel says, “truth is, I’m the family fuck up,” and “running with the club and from the cops, that shit broke my ma's heart.” He bites down when he says “not my Pop’s though. He always knew I was gonna make the wrong choices, the wrong promises,” and then “Pops was prepared for it, never tried to stop me,” and after a long pause he lays his deepest confession at her feet, “I’m not sure when he started hating me, but he stopped hiding it when I got EZ that gun.”

“Angel…” she whispers. She feels a revelation coming on. As if a wrathful savior has finally, finally sent her an angel.

“I took the only good thing left in our family and I… I did what I always do. I ruined it. I ruined EZ’s life and he never even blamed me. Not once. All he’s talking about is how he wants to come home, join the club, and be brothers again.”

“And your father?” she’s fishing, trying to stem the erratic beat of her heart.

“Maybe he’ll let me in again. Maybe he’ll forgive me. He’s the best man you’ll ever meet, my pops. No one works harder, or longer. He deserved better. Better than a dead wife, a lost son, and getting stuck with me. But I'm gonna fix that. I'm gonna-”

Adelita shushes him. Dares to place a kiss on his cheek. She sees it now, the flayed open soul of Angel Reyes. She sees the fiery heap of his sorrows, bent and mangled along the roadside. Bloody streaks and road rash on his love-starved heart. The wreckage Angel still wears like his vests, permanent as his tattoos. It was not from the ones who had left him. Not Marisol Reyes. Not Ezekiel. Neither of them had broken his spirit all those years ago. Left him empty and yearning and listless. Unloved and never enough. Always trying and trying and never tiring.

It was Cortina. The man who ruined lives, ruined families, ruined his own son. Adelita could laugh, she could dance, or even sing forever about the fool she been to think there was ever, ever a choice.

She would make Cortina pay for everything. She would do so with the deepest malice, with nothing to regret.  _Para su madre, su padre, su hermanito… y su Angel_.

Adelita draws him close. Whispers mindless nothings and rubs circles into his back. In the morning, he'll be embarrassed and sore from sleeping on her floor. They will agree to take greater precautions. Angel saying he cannot lie to his brother. EZ sees right through him. He will have to be more careful, less present. And Adelita spins a lie about needing more time and isolation to regroup Los Olvidados. Before Angel departs she will tell him the truth. An abridged story of her parents' deaths at the cartel’s hands. Her own baby brother. She will tell him the name ‘Ignacio Cortina’ and Angel will not flinch, not a moment’s recognition. He will wish her happy hunting, telling her to make the bastard suffer.

And Adelita promises him she will.

 

 

_fin._

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my 101 Shots challenge, prompt #87: Pebbles.


End file.
